Sunday, August 3, 2008

Creating Family

As I write this, I am in a small cottage in a very small town on a small(ish) island. Where D happens to be related to a good 50% of the population going back 200 years. We're here for a family reunion. Where saying "I'm a Smith", means something. Where you can be a complete foreigner, not know a single person until someone sees your name and then you're *instant* family. All of a sudden a large portion of the restaurant we were at today became Family. Family who invites you over for dinner. Family who asks you if you've hear from so and so. Voila. Roots.

A lot of times we take these things for granted as the pace of daily life is awfully fast. I usually consider myself accomplished if we get to eat dinner a) together and b) before 9pm and c) not take-out!

It's very clear here about how many kids everyone has had. The Family is so large because generation after generation produced 6+ children per descendant. It's kind of amazing if you think about it. We got a genealogy book of the lineage, where we are just listed as one line. And then it stops.

Can we list our two frozen embryos as decendants? Maybe? Please? We worked really hard for them! No, really... you might have been able to have 3 or 4 kids easily (or 5 in 5 years as I heard someone say yesterday), but these two little groupings of cells came at a very high cost. And are very much loved. They are already a part of the family, as are the other twenty embryos that never made it along the way.

So now it's down to these two frozen little guys. Then the biological road ends for us.

I just read a bunch of your entries (stumbled upon your blog via another one...funny how that happens!) and I am excited for you and your cycle at CCRM. I'm doing my first cycle at CCRM in October (after three failed cycles with local RE). Can't wait to hear what happens next!

Here from IComLeavWe...Places like that always sound so interesting, but at least for me, the reality of living on an island where almost everyone is related would be stifling. Personally I'm happy to live in a place where I know a few people but there are also plenty of strangers -- people I have yet to meet, as well as people who will just leave me alone without asking all sorts of personal questions. But the other kind of place is nice to visit sometimes.